Enter the New Negroes

Enter the New Negroes

Author: Martha Jane Nadell

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780674015111

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With the appearance of the urban, modern, diverse "New Negro" in the Harlem Renaissance, writers and critics began a vibrant debate on the nature of African-American identity, community, and history. Martha Jane Nadell offers an illuminating new perspective on the period and the decades immediately following it in a fascinating exploration of the neglected role played by visual images of race in that debate. After tracing the literary and visual images of nineteenth-century "Old Negro" stereotypes, Nadell focuses on works from the 1920s through the 1940s that showcased important visual elements. Alain Locke and Wallace Thurman published magazines and anthologies that embraced modernist images. Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men, with illustrations by Mexican caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, meditated on the nature of black Southern folk culture. In the "folk history" Twelve Million Black Voices, Richard Wright matched prose to Farm Security Administration photographs. And in the 1948 Langston Hughes poetry collection One Way Ticket, Jacob Lawrence produced a series of drawings engaging with Hughes's themes of lynching, race relations, and black culture. These collaborations addressed questions at the heart of the movement and in the era that followed it: Who exactly were the New Negroes? How could they attack past stereotypes? How should images convey their sense of newness, possibility, and individuality? In what directions should African-American arts and letters move? Featuring many compelling contemporary illustrations, Enter the New Negroes restores a critical visual aspect to African-American culture as it evokes the passion of a community determined to shape its own identity and image.


Enter the New Negroes

Enter the New Negroes

Author: Martha Jane Nadell

Publisher:

Published: 2013-10-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9780674368828

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With the appearance of the urban, modern, diverse "New Negro" in the Harlem Renaissance, writers and critics began a vibrant debate on the nature of African-American identity, community, and history. Martha Jane Nadell offers an illuminating new perspective on the period and the decades immediately following it in a fascinating exploration of the neglected role played by visual images of race in that debate. After tracing the literary and visual images of nineteenth-century "Old Negro" stereotypes, Nadell focuses on works from the 1920s through the 1940s that showcased important visual elements. Alain Locke and Wallace Thurman published magazines and anthologies that embraced modernist images. Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men, with illustrations by Mexican caricaturist Miguel Covarrubias, meditated on the nature of black Southern folk culture. In the "folk history" Twelve Million Black Voices, Richard Wright matched prose to Farm Security Administration photographs. And in the 1948 Langston Hughes poetry collection One Way Ticket, Jacob Lawrence produced a series of drawings engaging with Hughes's themes of lynching, race relations, and black culture. These collaborations addressed questions at the heart of the movement and in the era that followed it: Who exactly were the New Negroes? How could they attack past stereotypes? How should images convey their sense of newness, possibility, and individuality? In what directions should African-American arts and letters move? Featuring many compelling contemporary illustrations, Enter the New Negroes restores a critical visual aspect to African-American culture as it evokes the passion of a community determined to shape its own identity and image.


"New Negroes from Africa"

Author: Rosanne Marion Adderley

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 722

ISBN-13: 0253347033

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In 1838, the British government outlawed the slave trade, emancipated all of the slaves in its possessions, and began to interdict slave ships en route to the Americas. Almost at once, colonies that had depended on slave labour were faced with a liberated and unwilling labour force. At the same time, newly freed slaves in Sierra Leone (and later from America and elsewhere) were "persuaded" to emigrate to other British colonies to provide a new workforce to replace or augment remnants of the old. Some became paid labourers, others indentured servants. These two groups - one, English-speaking colonists; the other, new African immigrants - are the focus of this study of "receptive" communities in the West Indies. Adderley describes the formation of these settlements, and, working from scant records, tries to tease out information about the families of liberated Africans, the labour they performed, their religions, and the culture they brought with them. She addresses issues of gender, ethnicity, and identity, and concludes with a discussion of repatriation.


Chicago's New Negroes

Chicago's New Negroes

Author: Davarian L. Baldwin

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009-11-30

Total Pages: 380

ISBN-13: 0807887609

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As early-twentieth-century Chicago swelled with an influx of at least 250,000 new black urban migrants, the city became a center of consumer capitalism, flourishing with professional sports, beauty shops, film production companies, recording studios, and other black cultural and communal institutions. Davarian Baldwin argues that this mass consumer marketplace generated a vibrant intellectual life and planted seeds of political dissent against the dehumanizing effects of white capitalism. Pushing the traditional boundaries of the Harlem Renaissance to new frontiers, Baldwin identifies a fresh model of urban culture rich with politics, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship. Baldwin explores an abundant archive of cultural formations where an array of white observers, black cultural producers, critics, activists, reformers, and black migrant consumers converged in what he terms a "marketplace intellectual life." Here the thoughts and lives of Madam C. J. Walker, Oscar Micheaux, Andrew "Rube" Foster, Elder Lucy Smith, Jack Johnson, and Thomas Dorsey emerge as individual expressions of a much wider spectrum of black political and intellectual possibilities. By placing consumer-based amusements alongside the more formal arenas of church and academe, Baldwin suggests important new directions for both the historical study and the constructive future of ideas and politics in American life.


The Last Negroes at Harvard

The Last Negroes at Harvard

Author: Kent Garrett

Publisher: Mariner Books

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1328879976

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The untold story of the Harvard class of '63, whose Black students fought to create their own identities on the cusp between integration and affirmative action. In the fall of 1959, Harvard recruited an unprecedented eighteen "Negro" boys as an early form of affirmative action. Four years later they would graduate as African Americans. Some fifty years later, one of these trailblazing Harvard grads, Kent Garrett, would begin to reconnect with his classmates and explore their vastly different backgrounds, lives, and what their time at Harvard meant. Garrett and his partner Jeanne Ellsworth recount how these eighteen youths broke new ground, with ramifications that extended far past the iconic Yard. By the time they were seniors, they would have demonstrated against national injustice and grappled with the racism of academia, had dinner with Malcolm X and fought alongside their African national classmates for the right to form a Black students' organization. Part memoir, part group portrait, and part narrative history of the intersection between the civil rights movement and higher education, this is the remarkable story of brilliant, singular boys whose identities were changed at and by Harvard, and who, in turn, changed Harvard.


The New Negro Aesthetic

The New Negro Aesthetic

Author: Alain Locke

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2022-01-18

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 014313521X

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Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer edits a collection of Alain Locke's influential essays on the importance of the Black artist and the Black imagination A Penguin Classic For months, the philosopher Alain Locke wrestled with the idea of the Negro as America's most vexing problem. He asked how shall Negroes think of themselves as he considered the new crop of poets, novelists, and short story writers who, in 1924, wrote about their experiences as Black people in America. He did not want to frame Harlem and Black writing as yet another protest against racism, nor did he want to focus on the sociological perspective on the "Negro problem" and Harlem as a site of crime, poverty, and dysfunction. He wanted to find new language and a new way for Black people to think of themselves. The essays and articles collected in this volume, by Locke's Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer, are the result of that new attitude and the struggle to instill the New Negro aesthetics, as Stewart calls it here, into the mind of the twentieth century. To be a New Negro poet, novelist, actor, musician, dancer, or filmmaker was to commit oneself to an arc of self-discovery of what and who the Negro was—would be—without fear that one would disappoint the white or Black bystander. In committing to that path, Locke asserted, one would uncover a "being-in-the-world" that was rich and bountiful in its creative possibilities, if Black people could turn off the noise of racism and see themselves for who they really are: a world of creative people who have transformed, powerfully and perpetually, the culture of wherever history or social forces landed them.


Prove It On Me

Prove It On Me

Author: Erin D. Chapman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-03-27

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 0199877203

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In the wake of the Great Migration of thousands of African Americans from the scattered hamlets and farms of the rural South to the nation's burgeoning cities, a New Negro ethos of modernist cultural expression and potent self-determination arose to challenge white supremacy and create opportunities for racial advancement. In Prove It On Me, Erin D. Chapman explores the gender and sexual politics of this modern racial ethos and reveals the constraining and exploitative underside of the New Negro era's vaunted liberation and opportunities. Chapman's cultural history documents the effects on black women of the intersection of primitivism, New Negro patriarchal aspirations, and the early twentieth-century consumer culture. As U.S. society invested in the New Negroes, turning their expressions and race politics into entertaining commodities in a sexualized, primitivist popular culture, the New Negroes invested in the idea of black womanhood as a pillar of stability against the unsettling forces of myriad social and racial transformations. And both groups used black women's bodies and identities to "prove" their own modern notions and new identities. Chapman's analysis brings together advertisements selling the blueswoman to black and white consumers in a "sex-race marketplace," the didactic preachments of New Negro reformers advocating a conservative gender politics of "race motherhood," and the words of the New Negro women authors and migrants who boldly or implicitly challenged these dehumanizing discourses. Prove It On Me investigates the uses made of black women's bodies in 1920s popular culture and racial politics and black women's opportunities to assert their own modern, racial identities.


A History of the Harlem Renaissance

A History of the Harlem Renaissance

Author: Rachel Farebrother

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-02-04

Total Pages: 453

ISBN-13: 1108640508

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The Harlem Renaissance was the most influential single movement in African American literary history. The movement laid the groundwork for subsequent African American literature, and had an enormous impact on later black literature world-wide. In its attention to a wide range of genres and forms – from the roman à clef and the bildungsroman, to dance and book illustrations – this book seeks to encapsulate and analyze the eclecticism of Harlem Renaissance cultural expression. It aims to re-frame conventional ideas of the New Negro movement by presenting new readings of well-studied authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, alongside analysis of topics, authors, and artists that deserve fuller treatment. An authoritative collection on the major writers and issues of the period, A History of the Harlem Renaissance takes stock of nearly a hundred years of scholarship and considers what the future augurs for the study of 'the New Negro'.


The New Negro in the Old South

The New Negro in the Old South

Author: Gabriel A. Briggs

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2015-11-13

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 0813574803

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Standard narratives of early twentieth-century African American history credit the Great Migration of southern blacks to northern metropolises for the emergence of the New Negro, an educated, upwardly mobile sophisticate very different from his forebears. Yet this conventional history overlooks the cultural accomplishments of an earlier generation, in the black communities that flourished within southern cities immediately after Reconstruction. In this groundbreaking historical study, Gabriel A. Briggs makes the compelling case that the New Negro first emerged long before the Great Migration to the North. The New Negro in the Old South reconstructs the vibrant black community that developed in Nashville after the Civil War, demonstrating how it played a pivotal role in shaping the economic, intellectual, social, and political lives of African Americans in subsequent decades. Drawing from extensive archival research, Briggs investigates what made Nashville so unique and reveals how it served as a formative environment for major black intellectuals like Sutton Griggs and W.E.B. Du Bois. The New Negro in the Old South makes the past come alive as it vividly recounts little-remembered episodes in black history, from the migration of Colored Infantry veterans in the late 1860s to the Fisk University protests of 1925. Along the way, it gives readers a new appreciation for the sophistication, determination, and bravery of African Americans in the decades between the Civil War and the Harlem Renaissance.